Cranberries: The All-American Fruit

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Alison

Those quintessentially American bright-red, tiny, tart berries that signal fall and the holidays are back. It’s officially cranberry season—both when the tart superfruit is harvested and eaten. Twenty percent of all cranberries consumed annually are gobbled during Thanksgiving week.

The First Thanksgiving

Were cranberries on the table at the first Thanksgiving feast shared by the English Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag people in 1621? Maybe, say food historians. Cranberry sauce, as we know it, was unlikely part of the menu. Sugar was in short supply, if it was available at all, and the first mention of boiling cranberries with sugar doesn’t appear in print for another 50 years. But, say the folks at Plimoth Plantation (a museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that replicates the 17th century settlement), freshly harvested cranberries may well have turned up in dishes shared by Wampanoag guests or used by Pilgrims to add a tart note to a dish.

It’s known that Native Americans brewed the berries into calming tea and poultices to help wounds heal. Later, American whalers kept vitamin C-rich cranberries on board to help prevent scurvy. Modern-day research finds the fruit may have many other benefits.

Here are some stats on how we enjoy this superfood in the present day:

96: Percentage of first-time hosts who plan to include cranberries in some form in their Thanksgiving feast

60: Percentage of U.S. cranberry crop grown in Wisconsin (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington are other leading producers)

400 million: Pounds of cranberries Americans consume annually

2.3: Pounds of cranberries consumed per capita in the U.S., mostly in the form of juice.

200: Number of berries, on average, in a can of cranberry sauce

So go ahead, use our recipes to get started on your holiday cranberry quota